The Howerter Blog

I have started reading about Asterisk the open source PBX. I am installing it at my house. Since I have Vonage I can use Asterisk to connect directly via a SIP trunk. This way I will not have to use the Vonage adapter. Katherine doesn’t see the purpose of this project. I think I just feel ashamed to be a VOIP guy and not have a IP-PBX at my house.

The Vineyard softball team had it first game last night. It was really enjoyable. It rained halfway through, but we finished the game and lost by 1 run. Everyone did very well. I will take my camera next time and get some action shots.

I frequently read Failblog and I came across this beauty. If you don’t read Failblog, you should start today.

I am glad that a Miss USA contestant had the courage to stand by her beliefs. I would imagine it is why she didn’t win, but I think the greater victory is holding true to your core values.

This weekend we said goodbye to Katherine’s grandfather, Elmer Suttles. It was kind of sudden and it took quite a toll on the family. The wake and funeral were this weekend. He had a good life and was the cornerstone of a great family. We will miss you Elmer. We will see you when we get to heaven.

On our recordings at church there has been a very audible hum. Last night I spent a couple of hours trying to get rid of the hum. I discovered that when I connected the board to the new recording PC, the noise went away. A balanced connection is most likely the solution. This has been bothering me for a couple of months now. I am glad to have it resolved.

I am a little tired of having my servers break. Lately, I have been having to do maintenance on my servers almost every night. My backups haven’t been running for a couple of weeks now. I have been trying to move everything off the old web server so it can be my dedicated backup server. Now I finally have everything off so I can begin that process.

My current web server needs to be rebuilt so I have been trying to move everything to another server. I first tried to move my PHP apps to a Windows Server 2008 box. I must say I am not impressed with the FastCGI module in IIS 7. If could have been due to the OS being 64-bit, but the pages were taking 7-10 seconds to load. This server is also my Exchange server so I know it has the horsepower. Anyway, I decided to use a 1.3GHz  Celeron e-Machine and installed Windows Server 2003 Web Edition. This is working well. I forgot how much a pain it is to rebuild a web server.

I finally got around to connecting our church piano to the MIDI controller. I must say I am impressed with the setup. I spent a couple of hours downloading a bunch of instruments. Most of them are not worth using, but I found some good grand piano and Fender Rhodes samples. I still have a lot to learn, but at least it is a start.

Has anyone seen the new Pepsi Refresh Anthem commercial? It starts with Bob Dylan and shows a series of then and now pictures. The final montage is some rapper that is supposed to represent our generation. Does anyone else have a problem with rap being our generation’s defining music?